A Rockefeller Cafe? Big Plans for Estate, And a Few Murmurs

By MARIAN BURROS

Published: December 22, 2002

POCANTICO HILLS, N.Y.—
The Rockefellers are no strangers to commerce, but for more than a century commerce has been an unwelcome stranger to this aristocratic preserve where six generations of the family have lived, carefully guarding against development.

That is about to change: David Rockefeller, the 87-year-old patriarch of the family and grandson of the oil magnate John D. Rockefeller Sr., is converting an 80-acre cattle farm on his property into a nonprofit organic farm and education center on the environment and agriculture.

To help the complex support itself, there will be profit-making components: a restaurant, a catering hall, a cafe that will serve its produce, and a handful of offices. Plans for private homes and possibly a small hotel and spa near the restaurant have drawn mixed reactions from other Rockefeller family members.

The 80-seat organic restaurant, to be run by the owners of the Blue Hill restaurant in Greenwich Village, is expected to open in the fall. It is likely to draw patrons from all over to this hidden hamlet 45 minutes from Rockefeller Center, just as the bidding to run it drew A-list restaurateurs like David Bouley and Gray Kunz of Manhattan and Thomas Keller of the French Laundry in Napa Valley.

As the cost of the project has soared, from an estimate of $10 million to more than $28 million, which Mr. Rockefeller is donating, he has sought other ways to help finance it. He has given the nonprofit foundation running the complex 100 acres of his personal estate for building the private homes. Plans are also being discussed for the hotel and spa on a separate, 30-acre parcel near the restaurant.

The restaurant-farm project has stirred few ripples in this tiny Westchester County community, where the Rockefellers have conscientiously consulted their neighbors and opened their checkbooks over the years for all kinds of civic needs.

Inside the family, however, the plans have involved several years of discussion, and some lingering dissent. The family supports the farm and restaurant, members say. But a faction remains upset about the housing's environmental impact, the use of open space for the hotel and increased traffic.

''The hotel is absolutely unacceptable,'' said one family member who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ''We are already up in arms, but quietly. I feel this is like the Central Park of Westchester and that none of it should be developed.''

Mr. Rockefeller has been negotiating with the Manhattan developer Bernard Goldberg to build a 75-room hotel and spa. ''We have the basic parameters of a contract in mind,'' said Mr. Goldberg, the former chief executive of the Gotham Hospitality Group, which was known for its small upscale Manhattan hotels.

James Ford, Mr. Rockefeller's personal assistant, said that in light of the opposition that has surfaced, the hotel project ''probably won't be visited for three or four years.''

In Pocantico Hills, where about 10 Rockefeller families live alongside about 300 other residents, the Rockefellers have stood careful watch over open space, donating about 1,100 acres of their original 3,500-acre estate for the Rockefeller State Park Preserve.

Over the years, family members have sold parcels for housing, but commercial ventures are something new. After the Rockefellers settled here in the 1890's, they pruned the community of its few small hotels and stores as the hamlet was gradually absorbed into the Rockefeller estate. Today, Pocantico Hills has only four nonresidential properties: two churches, a public school and a firehouse.

Peggy Dulany, a daughter of David and Margaret Rockefeller, said she first proposed the idea of an organic farm to her mother, who started raising prize-winning cattle here in the 1970's and was a co-founder of the American Farmland Trust, whose mission is to stop the loss of farmland and to promote environmentally sound farming.

After Mrs. Rockefeller died in 1996, Ms. Dulany said, ''my father and I were brainstorming, looking for something not only that would earn income -- the restaurant -- but some kind of program that was in keeping with her ideas, the value of sustainable agriculture,'' and a way to save the farm's Norman-style timber-and-stone barns, built by John D. Rockefeller Jr. in the 1930's.

David Rockefeller said the organic-farm project is in memory of his wife. ''I would hope that this would be a fitting and wonderful way to preserve some wonderful buildings built by my father so they would have a future,'' he said. ''The concept of education on agriculture in the Hudson Valley, together with a first-class restaurant in Westchester, has become a very appealing project.''

About four years ago, Mr. Rockefeller went to other family members with the proposal to create the farm and restaurant complex, renovating the barns for their use, Mr. Ford said. Although the site was zoned for single-family housing, Mr. Rockefeller sought a zoning change and donated the farm to a new nonprofit foundation, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, which will lease space to the restaurant.